Shame Page
It saddens me to have to put a page like this on my website, especially because the person that led me to create this claimed she liked all my templates so much. This person had started their own design site, but yet, her designs of not only her templates but also her main site has copied the entire source code of MY design site, and then amended JUST the colours, links, text, and images, leaving the rest of my html intact.
Some of the copied pages are more obvious than some, but the fact is, looking at source for the majority of her pages and mine, to compare them is trivial. Here are the two source codes for a design she claimed to have created herself that was blatently stolen from my Urban City design. The only differences in this are colour codes, the image, and text.
This person had no remorse for what she did, stating on several occasions that she did not steal anything, that she got my source code as a preset from a friend. The details of this friend were that he had a diary on diaryland, which no longer resolved, and had no contact details. She then sent me a copy of this "preset", which I have included here. As you can see, there are no indents in the html of this preset, and yet, on every page she has on her site, there are indents identical to those of mine, (as I said, it was absolutely identical down to the last quotation mark). Something she fails to see is that my point about the indents is not that it makes any difference to how the browser views html, but the fact that every designer indents html differently, and mine is very distinctive. I then happened to notice that on her main page was a link to my guestbook, a link which she had obviously forgotten to change to point to her own. When confronted about this link, she failed to reply, instead changing the link and then closing down her site, with the message "This site has moved to an undisclosed location for revamping. This site location will close permanently." posted on this site.
She copied whole sections of text, and changed the wording to fit her site, which is how I believe the link to my guestbook appeared on her page. Here is evidence of that, with screenshots taken of various pages on her site, with text she has changed the wording of. She has even copied my generic filler text I use on my templates, keeping the wording practically the same, but including the same textboxes, and even the guestbook signing boxes at the bottom are identical, down to the wording in the message box.
I have a set of screenshots of my original design and her ripped off design(s) based on those layouts. She has also had the audacity to submit one of my modified layouts to a site in an attempt to win an award for it.
She did all of this without full and proper credit. She had a simple button to my page on her links page, with no mention that it was my site from which she got most of her content. Nor did she mention on layouts she modified from mine that the coding was mine. After email correspondence, she admitted that two of her layouts were copied, and she removed the link to them, but failed to remove the other fifteen or so that she also copied. In her last email to me, she informed me that she is "not going to stop designing templates either". Now I wouldn't actually mind if that's what she did in the first place, but everyone knows that stealing someone else's source code and changing a few minor details is NOT designing.
Rather than replying to me about the guestbook link, she then created a fake yahoo account, and sent me an email, supposedly from the guy who gave her the preset. Only the email came from the same computer that she used to send her emails to me. Go here to read this email. It's amusing, really.
LINKS
Sourcecode Comparisons
The so-called "preset"
The screenshots that show my wording and hers.
My original templates I offer on my website, and her modifications.
An email she sent in an act of desperation to clear her name.
SHAME ON YOU, LADY AURA.
**UPDATE** Lady Aura has now put her site back up, not as a design site, but basically a "Fuck You" site to whoever visits it from here. How mature. Not.